we'll make pretend that you and me lived ever after happily
by hale-and-hearty
Summary: luke is a photographer. life as he knows it, through the lens of a camera, is made up of two snapshots: before his mother got sick, and after. the world goes to shit when he's twenty-four and a third snapshot is added. / jason/luke, companion piece to "magic lanterns to somebody whose body casts no light"


**AN:** **Companion piece to "magic lanterns to somebody whose body casts no light," as per popular demand (i.e., that one person who said "magic lanterns" was too short and Jahfreen, who is a horrible, wonderful enabler). This, in the same fashion as "magic lanterns," was written in one sitting, and all mistakes are mine. Title from House of Gold by Twenty One Pilots.**

 **Dedicated to Jahfreen for all of her help plotting and for pushing me to write this as quickly as I did.**

* * *

Luke is a photographer. Life as he knows it, through the lens of a camera, is made up of two snapshots: before his mother got sick, and after.

The world goes to shit when he's twenty-four and a third snapshot is added.

* * *

The before shot of his mother is a dumb kid smoking at some dumb park in Westford, Connecticut. The after shot is the same dumb kid growing up too quickly and selling everything (even himself) to pay for medical bills he shouldn't have to worry about.

The third shot is his mother climbing out of bed in the middle of the night, moving on her own for the first time in years, and trying to strangle Luke in his sleep. He puts a bullet in her skull with a gun he stole from his latest trick and leaves the house he grew up in without looking back.

* * *

Luke was always meant to be alone. He was always too fucked in the head for anyone else. He takes pictures of corpses hanging from trees with a digital camera that he charges when he can and thinks back to the trip to Rome he took, years ago, back when he was still some dumb kid without a care in the world. He took pictures of roman statues, then, gods who walked among men. He takes pictures of the death that lives among men now and smokes stolen cigarettes and tries not to think too much about that goddamn optimistic kid from the photography class he taught a while back, the one who bragged about his photography project (taking a picture of the sunset every night for a year) and how lost that kid has to be, now. Wasted all his time on a year of sunsets, for what?

For the world to crumble apart because some scientists in some laboratory somewhere weren't as smart as they thought they were.

Luke takes a picture of the dwindling light and takes shelter in a worn-down library for the night. He locks himself in the cellar and kills the mindless librarian who had the same idea before she turned into another one of the walking corpses, and he puts everything he has into surviving a world he's not sure he wants to live in anymore.

* * *

Luke gets caught out too late, one night, too far away from shelter to escape and not enough bullets in the gun holstered on his thigh to fight. He takes pictures of the way demise descends upon him in the form of walking corpses who snarl and shuffle and howl like goddamn wolves at the moon, and he's thankful, for the first time, that he's alone. So he's not taking anyone with him when he goes.

* * *

He uses the last three bullets in his clip and waits for a death that never comes. He's still taking pictures when two fingers are hooked through his belt loop and yanking him back into the floor of a car.

There's a blurry picture of blond hair and blue eyes caught in the flash of his camera. This is how he meets Jason Grace.

* * *

"What the fuck were you thinking," the other blond snaps, fingers clenched tight around the steering wheel of his black Camaro, jaw locked, eyes set angrily on the blood smeared across his windshield from the corpse he ran into to save Luke. "Were you just going to stand there and wait to get fucking eaten? Are you _insane_?"

Luke snaps rapid pictures of the set of his jaw and the curl of his fingers and the blood on the windshield before answering. "Wouldn't be a stretch if I was." He thinks _maybe it runs in the family_ and shudders at the phantom recoil of the shot that killed his mom. He still feels it in his hand, sometimes.

The other blond exhales, loud and sharp, nostrils flaring, eyebrows sloping down in an angry, wrinkled line. Luke takes a picture of that, too.

"Can you just put the camera away for one goddamn second?" the boy snaps, and Luke takes one last picture before letting the camera thump against his chest. The boy takes a couple quick, deep breaths before speaking again. "You'd be dead right now if I hadn't shown up when I did."

"I'm aware," Luke quips. He hesitates, adds, "Thank you," even though he's not sure he means it.

Silence hangs thick in the air. Luke takes the moment to study the boy, sees he's every inch the roman statue—blond hair mussed to perfection, blue eyes that have a stern but gentle set to them, a scar above cupid bow lips, a sculpted jaw line, strong muscles rippling beneath the arms of a black Henley. He really _is_ a boy, Luke realizes. Still a teenager, probably. Young in the face.

"I'm Jason," the boy says, finally. "Jason Grace."

"My saving grace," Luke deadpans. Jason grimaces, like he's heard the joke before, and it's fair to assume that he has. He adds, "Luke Castellan."

One sharp jerk of Jason's chin is his response. Luke's not talkative, really, not since his mom got sick (another before he'll never get back), so he lets the silence stand. He rests his head against the door and watches the world swirling around outside the window and falls asleep like that.

* * *

He wakes in a gas station parking lot, midafternoon sun filtering in through the windshield, and he takes a picture of the strong back muscles and firm ass standing outside the driver's window before he climbs out of the Camaro.

"You're up," Jason says, looking over the roof of the car at Luke.

Luke nods. "What's our destination?"

Jason shrugs. "Everything's gone and everyone's dead. There is no destination."

"So the plan is to drive around endlessly and pick strangers up off the streets?"

A small smile tugs at the corners of Jason's mouth. "It's as good a plan as any. Saved your ass, didn't it?"

Luke smiles back, feels like his teeth are wires that his lips get caught on because it's such a foreign use of his mouth. "So it did."

He finds a box of cigarettes and a six pack of beers in the gas station. Jason says, "I'm not old enough to drink," in a low voice and Luke arches a brow at him.

"Not old enough to die, either," he says, and before they leave, he takes a picture of the havoc wrecked upon the gas station.

* * *

Jason gives Luke a sword, maybe two or three weeks into this thing they have. Luke doesn't ask where he found it and Jason doesn't say, but watching Jason wield his own sword, shirtless and glistening with sweat under the bright light of the sun as he shows Luke how to do it, reminds Luke again of the statues in Rome, and he thinks that, if they'd met in any other lifetime, they could have gone to Rome together.

Jason Grace wouldn't be out of place in the city. If he stood still for too long, he'd become part of the scenery, just another statue of another lost god.

* * *

Luke runs out of room on his camera and steals another SD card from an electronics store with broken windows. He's in there for two minutes before he registers the corpse crawling out of the shadows, careful not to step foot in the light.

Luke's sword goes straight through its temple, and when the corpse crumples to the ground, there's black blood dripping from the blade of the sword.

Luke puts the new SD card in the camera, pockets the old one, and photographs the blood on the sword with the broken windows in the background, light shimmering vibrantly on the glass shards littering the ground.

Luke's mother, before she was insane and before she was sick, used to tell him that he could see the beauty in everything. He guesses she was right, because he's surrounded by all this death, but all he can think about is the perfect camera angle to showcase how beautiful it all is.

* * *

It's late and Jason has a beer hanging off his fingertips, down in the basement of some house in Arizona. The house is a wreck and in the bedroom, hundreds of pictures of the same goddamn sunset are strewn across the floor, but they're safe down in the basement, which is earthy and cool.

"My sister," Jason is saying. "She was the only one I had. My mom was a drug addict, took off with some guy when I was a kid, and my dad—never knew him." He shrugs, glassy-eyed from just enough liquor to loosen his lips. "Haven't seen her since this shit started." He gestures around the basement, like that could somehow encompass the state of complete and utter disrepair the world has fallen into. "Maybe she's still alive. Maybe not. She was visiting my cousins in New York when the first wave of corpses started crawling up out of the grave. Maybe she's still out there, somewhere."

Luke knows that this is where he's supposed to relate, to mention his sick mom and his absentee dad, but he doesn't. He takes a swig of his beer and says, "You ever think about going to Rome?"

There's a pause. "Rome," Jason repeats, cocking his head to the side. "No. Not really. Why? Have you been?"

Luke nods, looks out the one window, high above the floor, peeking out onto the lawn in front of the house. "Yeah, once. A long time ago. It's nice this time of year."

"We should go," Jason says. His words slur a little and when Luke looks back, he's taking another swig of his beer. "To Rome. You and me."

Luke smirks, holds up his camera to take a picture. There's something so satisfying about seeing Jason tipsy. Ruffled and imperfect, like layers were pealed away and underneath the golden image of a roman statue, there's a twenty year old kid who's just as fucked in the brain as Luke is.

"Alright," Luke agrees. "You and me. Rome."

* * *

They never make it that far.

* * *

They're flying down the empty interstate at ninety miles per hour when they see her. Golden blond curls, warm, caramel skin, ragged clothes. Standing in the middle of the road, directly in their path, chin lifted high in defiance.

Luke takes a picture in the second before Jason slams on the breaks and breathes, "Hazel?"

Jason is out of the car before he remembers to put it in park, but that's what Luke is here for. He climbs out, too, watches as Jason tackles the girl in a hug and Luke takes pictures of the look on the girl's face before she buries it in Jason's shoulder.

"Jason Grace," a girl's voice calls, and Luke turns to photograph the girl in combat books and bronze-plated body army step up onto the street like some Amazonian warrior, arms folded over her chest, dark hair braided down her back and purple hoodie tied around her waist.

"Reyna," Jason breathes, and pulls away from the first girl to embrace the other. Luke photographs this embrace, too, and wonders at the tugging in his gut. He knows it's jealousy, knows he hasn't felt it in _years_ , but he doesn't know why he's feeling it as he looks at Jason and Reyna hugging.

* * *

(That's a lie. He knows exactly why he feels this way, and he hates himself for it.)

* * *

There's a night when they're all too drunk to think straight, hunkered down in a liquor store. Reyna and Hazel passed out hours ago and Jason and Luke are in some kind of competition to see who can hold more liquor, and this is how Luke finds himself saying, "When my mom got sick, I didn't have a way to pay for the medical bills. So I did whatever I could. Conned money out of nice people and stole from rich stores and fucked fat, old guys for wads of cash, and I fucking _hated myself_ for every single moment of it."

"That's so sad," Jason babbles, drunk and leaning too far into Luke's space. "That's so sad, Luke. That explains why you're so sad all the time."

"I'm not sad," Luke protests, but Jason's hands are on his face, smoothing out the crease in his brow.

"Not all the time," Jason allows, "but most of the time. You don't look sad when you're hiding behind your camera. And you don't look sad when you look at me like you think I don't know you're watching."

"I don't—" Luke tries, but Jason smooshes his fingers over Luke's mouth, giggling.

"You do," he insists. "You like me so much and that's okay because I like you so much, too."

Then Luke has a lapful of one drunk Jason Grace, and if he were any more sober or any more of a better person, he would put this on pause until they were sober enough to make this decision the right way. As it is, he rolls Jason onto his back, and _takes him_.

* * *

(Drunken, nude photographs of Jason find their way onto Luke's camera, and they're _beautiful_.)

* * *

The next morning, Reyna growls at them to cover it up and do it somewhere else next time. Luke is hungover and Jason won't meet his gaze and this, Luke thinks, is why he's better off alone.

He just fucks everything up when he's around people for too long.

* * *

Hazel and Reyna are on their way to rumored safe grounds in Long Island Sound, so that's where Luke and Jason head, too.

"It's called Camp Half-Blood," Hazel says, soft and quiet in the backseat. "Supposedly, they're trying to save the world there."

They drive past a treehouse and Luke snaps a picture of the silhouette he sees in the window, the face and the pink bow and the big round eyes.

The little girl in the treehouse looks alive, but Luke doesn't say anything and they don't stop to check on her.

* * *

Things Jason finds at Camp Half-Blood include his entire life from before the end of the world. His sister, Thalia, who hugs Luke and thanks him for taking care of her brother, even though Luke is pretty sure it was the other way around, and his godmother, Lupa, and his best friend, Leo. Word has it that Jason's cousin and his cousin's wife are out there, somewhere, doing something to try and get the world back on track. Jason's whole life from before is here.

Jason corners him, that first night, when Luke is looking at the cabin he's expected to share with all these other people.

"We need to talk," Jason says, low and insistent, and he tugs Jason away by his sleeve, into the dark space between two cabins. He shoves Luke up against the wall before Luke can say anything.

"I like you," Jason says, almost a growl. "I like you a lot, asshole. And I don't remember a lot of what happened because I was so drunk, but I know we had sex. So just tell me, okay. Stop making me wonder and hope and second guess everything. Do you actually like me or were you just too drunk to care about anything but getting your dick wet?"

A flare of _something_ stings in Luke's stomach. He says, "I was drunk, too, but I remember telling you a lot more about myself than I've told anyone else."

Jason blushes, looks away, and Luke takes that to mean he remembers, too. He pushes Jason back a couple steps. "I used to be a _whore_ ," he hisses. "I'm not some delicate thing that you have to protect and save and rescue."

Jason sets his jaw tight. "It's an easy question, Luke. Do you like me or not?"

Luke kisses him, hard and bruising, instead of answering. Something tells him that Jason knows what he means, anyways.

* * *

Luke's roommates include two boys, twins, named Connor and Travis, who tease him relentlessly for the dumb look he wears on his face when he comes back in later that night, wrung out from an orgasm and dizzy from the way Jason kissed him goodnight.

And Luke almost doesn't care.

* * *

Jason's cousin, Percy, brings their other cousin, Nico, Hazel's half-brother, with him when he returns. Another happy reunion, Luke thinks, until he watches the other kid who came with them, one who looks awfully familiar, climb back into the RV they arrived in and take off again.

Sitting around the campfire that night, Nico looks miserable, and Luke—doesn't blame him. He listens as Nico explains in a hollow voice that Will was the first person he'd met, after the world went to shit, and that Will was all he had, and he listens as one of the other campers, Jake, mentions that Will was his ex-boyfriend, that they shared a house and a life together in Arizona, had moved there after spending a year in Connecticut, and Luke finally figures out why this guy, Will, looked so familiar.

His photography student, the one with three hundred and sixty-five pictures of the same goddamn sunset.

So that's what happened to him, Luke thinks. He lost everything and then he lost himself.

Jason's hand slides into Luke's and Luke clings tight, because he's already lost himself—he's not ready to lose everything else.

* * *

Jason seeks him out, one night, tugs him close by his belt loops and pecks his mouth, quick and sweet, and says, "I'm tired of hanging out here waiting for something interesting to happen. Let's get out of here. Let's… Rome. Let's go to Rome. You and me."

"You and me," Luke agrees, before ducking back in for another, longer kiss, "Rome."

* * *

(They were never going to make it that far.)

* * *

Luke has millions of pictures of Jason on his camera. His favorite is from another mini war, Jason against a dozen corpses, Luke taking pictures instead of helping because he knows Jason can handle this. And if he can't, Luke knows he can help.

The particular photograph in question shows Jason at his most fierce, his most powerful, and it makes Luke think about those roman statues again, about how this is the balance between sculptures of gods and corpses hanging from trees: Jason Grace.

When Jason Grace dies, Luke adds just one more picture to the millions already on his camera.

* * *

It's a mistake. It's a dumb mistake.

There's a crackle over the car radio and Percy Jackson's voice announcing that they've found a cure, and Jason is excited, and Luke kisses him, and then the Camaro is wrapped around a tree and Jason isn't breathing.

And even though he's shaking and crying, Luke takes a picture now, too, to immortalize Jason just like one of those roman statues that he never got to see.

Jason was a balance between the worst of things and everything good in the world. Jason was life and air and brightness and the only good thing to ever happen to Luke, but he never once shied away from Luke's darkness, from his morbid fascination with taking pictures of corpses or the whore Luke used to be.

And Luke thinks, if something like Jason can end as dark as this, wrapped around a tree and covered in blood, glass shards a necklace embedded in his skin…

Well. That'd be a pretty good metaphor for Luke's life, wouldn't it?

* * *

He finds someone with a boat and a radio farther up the coast. Ethan, his name is, and he's got an eyepatch from some hell the end of the world caused.

"Jason's dead," Luke tells Percy over the radio, his voice flat and lifeless, and Ethan watches him with his good eye as he gets ready to leave port. "I thought you should know."

Percy is yelling something, heartbroken, but it's drowned out by the blood roaring in Luke's ears.

"I'm not coming back," he says, when Annabeth takes over the call. "There's nothing for me there."

"No," she agrees, "there's not. Where are you going?"

"Rome," Luke says. Then he shuts the radio off.

"Ready?" Ethan asks.

He is.

* * *

It takes a long time to get to Rome, longer than Luke expected. When they do, he steps off of the boat and onto the ground and he looks at this city, bustling with life, and he realizes a couple things very quickly.

The first: The world never ended. It was only America.

And the second: Rome is not the same without Jason.

Luke has this idea in his head, of how things would be if Jason had made it this far, and reality, he realizes, will never compare. Jason was a roman statue that never found its way home, and Luke only has photographs to say that he ever existed at all.

Luke looks up at the roman statues he always missed so much and thinks that he'd still rather have Jason. The statues dull in comparison to his lost Roman.

* * *

"When in Rome," he writes on the back of a postcard, "do as the Romans do."

He downs a handful of oxycontin and a bottle of Jack and lays down on the grass underneath one of the roman statues, takes a pictures of the bottle and one of himself (the first and last he'll ever take), and never gets back up again.

Four snapshots. One for before his mother was diagnosed and one for after, and one for when Jason died and one for when Luke did.


End file.
